The Horrors of State Action: Population Control

Most people are aware of some instances of population control, particularly in China, where families are limited in the number of children they are allowed and face grave repercussions if they disobey the edicts of the Chinese state. However, very few are aware of just how widespread this sort of policy was, and how recently they were implemented. From Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves1:

‘Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control,’ wrote John Holdren (now President Obama’s science advisor) and Paul and Anne Ehrlich in 1977, but not to worry: ‘It has been concluded that compulsory population control laws, even laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.‘ All right-thinking people agreed, as they so often do, that top-down government action was needed: people must be ordered or at least bribed to accept sterilisation and punished for refusing it.

Nor were the policies taken on in poorer nations like India and China simply a product of their culture, without any provocation from the West. Western governments and organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Foundation pushed for coerced sterilization policies in Asia and Africa.2 As have prominent “family planning” organizational leaders such as Norman Fleishman, who called China’s “one child” policy “a start” in 2011.3 In other examples from Ridley’s book:

Cheered on by Robert McNamara’s World Bank, Sanjay Ghandi, the son of the Indian prime minister, ran a vast campaign of rewards and coercion to force eight million poor Indians to accept vasectomies. In one episode, recounted by the historian Matthew Connelly, the village of Uttawar was surrounded by police and every eligible male sterilised. In response, a crowd gathered to defend the nearby village of Pipli, but police fired on the crowd, killing four people. A government official was unapologetic. In this war against ‘people pollution’, force was justified: ‘if some excesses appear, don’t blame me… Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.’

To add insult to (grave) injury, none of this was even necessary. The desired goal of falling birth rates was already occurring and continued to do so simply as a response to increased prosperity.4 Nor are resources necessarily finite such that an increased population cannot be matched with technology and increases in production (population does not exceed productive capability for long in any society). States killed and sterilized people around the world, adding yet another tragedy to the long list of those committed by those in power. And all for nothing, as is so often the case. Those skeptical of relying on free men and women to find solutions to a perceived problem should be extremely wary of those solutions the state implements.

Madam Peng Yu, Vice Minister of the State Family Planning Commission of China, revealed that the International Planned Parenthood Federation is one of the “major international agencies that have been extending cooperation to China.”

“Unless we act (this legislation [mandating insurance cover contraception], along with China’s “one child” policy, is a start), the world is doomed to strangle among coils of pitiless exponential growth.”

Altar & Throne

Help Support Altar & Throne

Do you like what you're seeing here? Help support us to keep the content comin'!

Bitcoin:

Paypal:

Affiliate

Many of us here at Altar & Throne have had our horizons expanded through Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, and believe in and endorse this product. Join today to get the education you've never received before!